I have been using FBB amateur radio software since
early nineties. It was the time of DOS operating
system, so most of us, system administrators (or, so
called system operators - sysop's), used various
packet radio software for DOS. Versions of FBB
packet radio BBS software for DOS, today are
known as DosFBB.
I still administer one DosFBB
database in the SRV (Amateur Radio Union of
Vojvodina, a part of SRJ). It is DosFBB v7.00g23
that runs on a 486DX computer with 16 MB of RAM
and Hercules b/w graphics. Since last December,
it runs without any re-boot (excepting some power
failures). Before that, it was a bit tricky to
set up all memory management properly, in order
to avoid "frozen" system. Although this server
runs under DOS, its "radio clients" don't depend
on that. In fact, users of that DosFBB might run
their client software under DOS, Windows, Linux
or any other operating system that offer amateur
packet radio abilities.
Two years ago, after I got my new box, Pentium 166
with 32 MB of RAM and VGA color graphics, I
switched to a Windows version of FBB (so called
WinFBB). Author of the software, an radio amateur
from France, Jean-Paul F6FBB, has made many
versions of WinFBB, including 16 bit variant for
Windows 3.x and Windows 9x as well as 32 bit variant for
Windows NT. I have run both variants until now
(at the moment it is 16 bit WinFBB v7.00g25 that runs
ok under Windows NT 4.0).
The main
difference between DosFBB and WinFBB is that the
second one offers you to do other jobs with your
computer, while FBB is running as just any other
application. Beside that, it is always nice to
copy a text from another application (for example,
from an Internet email) and to paste it into a
packet radio message.
In the mean time, I upgraded my system to the
Celeron 400 MHz with 96 MB of RAM and a big hard
disk that has enough room to install Linux and try
LinFBB ...